They promised to be back to us on what they found worked, what didn’t and how they could learn from the experience. So in brief here is what worked well, and what could be improved [click on the images for larger size].

So did it work? Have you heard of Millions Fed? Did you see the video? Have you read the book? Seen a presentation about the study cases or read an article somewhere discussing them?

In terms of page views, we ended up with the same kind of breakdown as before, but based on much larger numbers.In fact 22,673 page views of Millions Fed materials on the website. In addition there have been more than 2,150 visits to IFPRI millions fed videos.

How did people hear about Millions Fed?

We can see that traditional forms of dissemination still play a huge role in the raising of awareness for a product. Adding up those readers coming up, from a link in an email, reading an article in print, hearing or seeing something in the media and typing in the address or searching in Google for Millions Fed, we reach 69% for these sources. We reached different audiences through different products. YouTube in particular proved to be a significant source of traffic leading to 953 visits to pages featuring materials from the Millions Fed project.

The proportion categorized as mail is only visits from using a web based email system, those receiving email in outlook for example will be classed as a direct user. It was interesting to see that this proportion increased after the launch of the book. The website itself continued to be an important source of readers for the Millions Fed materials with 15% entering from other parts of the website with 23% coming from the front page of the site.

Twitter and YouTube are great fun but are they relevant?

As a proportion in terms of numbers of visitors the new media is clearly important, already it brings us more traffic than all the other sites that link to us.

In terms of relevant audiences we can judge this in terms of the retweeting of articles and the discovery of new partners, new communities on the web. There are perhaps not the geographical biases on the tools that we might think. Whilst visitors finding Millions Fed on Twitter came from the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Ethiopia, Singapore, India, Belgium, Germany, Brazil, Spain, Guernsey, Portugal, Tunisia, New Zealand and Switzerland. Visitors from YouTube came from developing countries too.

Nobody uses dialup any more do they?

Do we still need low bandwidth solutions for our sites?

Even though the number of visitors using a dial up connections is small, the surprise is where they come from!

Is Bing catching up with Google?

From our experience it only represents 15%. Although we are well indexed in Bing, with all the Millions Fed materials being indexed and even our tweets, there is still a complete domination of referrals from Google. The statistics shown are taken from AWstats, so this isn’t a quirk of Google Analytics.

Are Iphones and Blackberrys the way people view the web now?

Not yet ... on the day of the Millions Fed Book Launch we had 3801 visits to the IFPRI website, 5 of these were from an iPhone and 1 from a Blackberry. Of course we are not promoting on the platform, but interesting to see that so few of our existing audience in the Policy area are accessing the site from their phone.

If you are reading this article on an iPhone or Blackberry please get in touch.

Who featured Millions Fed?

Faster than expected, the net for Millions fed has grown in its first 2 months. A vast variety of sites featured Millions Fed: below [click on image for larger version] is just a selection from Google showing the different communities. There is a combination of websites and web 2.0 services. We have no doubt on how quickly the information spread using social media sources.

---'Millions Fed' aims to identify and examine successes in agricultural development and provide insights into the lessons they offer. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) called upon the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) to assess the evidence on what works in agriculture -- what sorts of policies, programs, and investments in agricultural development have actually reduced hunger and poverty.

2 Comments:

The blog piece on MillionsFed communication is fascinating. Looking back over the tweets, I wonder if the twitter campaign would have been impactful if instead of setting up a brand and making announcements you had enlisted individuals involved in the program to feed out updates on their involvement. My personal twitter filtering tends to favour human faced avatars not brands and personal reflections rather than factual statements. I don’t know much about viral advertising but I think that approach might have got bigger impact.